Tips to Improve Your Design Blog

Blogging has become the most important and widely used tool of new media technology. The concept has, once again, enabled the Internet to become a two way communicating medium. Since the advent of blogging, people from all walks of life have started pouring into this and have initiated blog sites of their particular expertise. One of its kinds is a Design Blog which is very popular among the graphic designing community and has significant number of readers.

There are numerous design blog sites working around the globe disseminating important information about layout, design, style, colors and everything that comes under the sun regarding designing. However, the mushroom growth of such blog sites has lowered the quality of design blogs, which is why I have come up with important tips to enhance the readership and quality of your design blog.

Your design blog gives customers an idea of your skills that you’ll use when creating their brochures and other marketing collateral.

Homepage Do’s and Don’ts

‘First impression is your last impression’, is a universal rule which can be applied to anything that is presented to one or a number of people. Your design blog is also one of those things. You may be a good designer or a design consultant and you are managing a design blog on the basis of your fine expertise, however; if you don’t pay heed to the nitty-gritty of your blog, you will not be able to achieve what to aim to get from this blog.

Do’s

The site has to be impressive in design and layout that the visitor should feel like exploring it and staying it longer than expected. It is wise to give the reader some insight about your blog on homepage. Writing a special note on describing your purpose of your blog site, achievements and statistical data on homepage can give a very good impression about the site.

Don’ts

Site moderator should avoid heavy design templates and flash animations which requires excessive bandwidth. It is wise not to confuse your visitor by putting hotchpotch design templates. Dark colors which make it difficult to read should be avoided too.

Suggestions for a Better Content Posting

After the design, the most important thing is the material available on your blog. One cannot just upload anything which comes in his/her mind. Following are some preemptive measures to be taken for better content posting on your blog:

Use descriptive titles of articles/post

Avoid writing slang language

Use most searched key words in your posts

Bold the important words/keywords of the post

Pictorial postings are always high ranked

Avoid irrelevant picture posting

The Tips

Post Regularly

It is highly advices to post regularly because the more often you update your blog, the more often your pages are indexed by the search engines, and the higher your ranking climbs. This makes blogs inherently more search-engine friendly as compare to websites. Websites don’t get updated for weeks, if not months, whereas many bloggers post new content on a regular basis.

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Socialize Your Blog

Socializing is not new to bloggers but associating your blog with social media website is not practiced as yet. It is recommended to post a link of your blog site on different social media websites e-g Facebook, Twitter, Orkut etc. There is an option on Twitter which allows different users to follow your updates. It is very efficient way to divert some traffic from big sites to your blog without much hassle.

RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds is unique tool to keep visitors loyal and up to date with your blog. Every time you upload something on your blog site RSS allows the subscribers to get update on their email or mobile. This method is helpful in retaining and maintaining the traffic on your website.

Give News to the Readers

It does not seem very significant to most of bloggers but having a small news section on your site is very useful. The news section should not be political but it can be regarding to design. It can give news about anything for example about different blog sites, bloggers or new in design industry.

Graphical Presentation

Displaying a graph representing the traffic on website is significant marketing tool. You can place a graph which depicts the actual or exaggerated traffic of website can index your site at better position in different search engines. It is good to mention the source of that data e-g google, or alexa.

Let them Contact You

It is important to make it very easy for visitors to contact you. Make your About page very clean and easy to read. Put some real human names on the website, and even consider adding a photo, so that people know who they’re addressing. Similarly, make it easy for readers to comment on your posts.

Easy Navigation

Most of blog owners do not pay attention to importance of navigating on their blog. They do not tend to transform the unwanted clutter into useful links. The main navigation tabs are sometimes difficult to find because just to make it fancy they make the sliding menu. It does not work all the time. It has also been seen that there are undesired tabs which just make the reader confusing.

Working Links

Most of people do not really take care of their blog site which should not be the case. It is a proper business but people just upload any template and do not remove the junk out of it. It leaves many broken links on the site which gives very negative impression about the owner. So it is highly advisable to remove unwanted links or at least post only those links which are not broken.

The Conclusion

Running a blog is unique and new way of earning money. It has provided a platform to all those who have something to say and there is a lot more for those who likes to consume the information available online. The above mentioned tips are general recommendations which can be applied to any blog site. There are many blogs who do not care about these tips and still are popular but not everyone has the same luck so it’s better to take precautions and suggestions.

Arfa Mirza is a EuroPakistani and a graduate of Media Studies. Writing is both, her passion and profession. She is big fan of world cultures and is the proud co-founder of dzineblog360 and webblog360, along with her husband.

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